TRADITIONAL RANKINGS

Traditionally, the number of victories is counted in order to calculate which country has been most successful at the Eurovision Song Contest. This method produces the following list:

  1. Ireland (1970, 1980, 1987, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996) – seven victories
  2. Sweden (1974, 1984, 1991, 1999, 2012, 2015) – six victories
  3. France (1958, 1960, 1962, 1969, 1977), Luxembourg (1961, 1965, 1972, 1973, 1983), United Kingdom (1967, 1969, 1976, 1981, 1997), The Netherlands (1957, 1959, 1969, 1975, 2019) – five victories
  4. Israel (1978, 1979, 1998, 2018) – four victories
  5. Denmark (1963, 2000, 2013), Norway (1985, 1995, 2009), Italy (1964, 1990, 2021) – three victories
  6. Switzerland (1956, 1988), Austria (1966, 2014), Spain (1968, 1969), Germany (1982, 2010), Ukraine (2004, 2016) – two victories
  7. Monaco (1971), Belgium (1986), Yugoslavia (1989), Estonia (2001), Latvia (2003), Turkey (2004), Greece (2005), Finland (2006), Serbia (2007), Russia (2008), Azerbaijan (2011), Portugal (2017) – one victory

That’s pretty clear: if we calculate it this way, Ireland is the champion, with Sweden creeping up in second place.

NON-TRADITIONAL RANKINGS

But is it really fair only to count the winners? Why not take second and third places into account? After all, that’s still impressive in a field of what is now forty-three participating countries.
There’s also the fact that the traditional rankings obviously favour the countries that have been involved in the Eurovision Song Contest since the beginning. To put it simply, they’ve had more opportunities to come first.

So, to come up with a more accurate picture, Eurostory has calculated the average score per country. The final position each year was weighted against the number of participants that year. Then the average score for all participating years was calculated.

If we line up the scores, this is the result:

  1. Ukraine 74,8
  2. Azerbaijan 71,4
  3. Russia 70,2
  4. Australia 67,1
  5. Sweden 60,6
  6. United Kingdom 60,3
  7. Italy 60,3
  8. Armenia 59,1
  9. France 57,0
  10. Serbia 55,8
  11. Ireland 54,9
  12. Greece 5,0
  13. Bosnia and Hercegovina 52,1
  14. Israel 51,4
  15. Romania 51,1
  16. Moldova 49,6
  17. Denmark 49,6
  18. Luxembourg 49,0
  19. Malta 46,6
  20. Monaco 45,4
  21. Germany 45,2
  22. Hungary 44,4
  23. Turkey 43,7
  24. Cyprus 42,6
  25. Switzerland 42,2
  26. Spain 42,2
  27. Norway 42,2
  28. Croatia 41,9
  29. The Netherlands 41,1
  30. Estonia 41,0
  31. Iceland 40,9
  32. Albania 38,9
  33. Georgia 38,5
  34. Yugoslavia 37,6
  35. Austria 35,6
  36. Belgium 34,0
  37. Lithuania 33,6
  38. Bulgaria 32,5
  39. Latvia 31,2
  40. Poland 30,0
  41. Finland 28,0
  42. Portugal 27,7
  43. Slovenia 27,4
  44. North-Macedonia 23,9
  45. Czechia 22,7
  46. Belarus 21,8
  47. San Marino 12,3
  48. Montenegro 10,8
  49. Slovakia 9,2
  50. Andorra 0,0

Conclusion 1: The top ten is more or less neatly divided between four ‘new’ Eurovision countries and six ‘old’ ones. It should be noted that the United Kingdom, in particular, is relying on past successes.

Conclusion 2: Topping the charts is Ukraine, after leaving the first place to Australia for just one year in 2019. So, once again: Ukraine is the true Eurovision champion.

N.B. 1: If the country did not reach the final, the score is zero.

N.B. 2: For the ‘Big Five’, the countries that pay the largest contribution to the European Broadcasting Union and therefore automatically have a place in the final, their results were weighted against the number of countries in the final. The same goes for the winner of the previous year.

N.B. 3: For the very first year of Eurovision (1956) goes that only the winner was announced, which was Switzerland. Since the other countries of that year never got a ranking, for them there is no 1956-score counted in their total average.

N.B. 4: Some countries have only taken part a couple of times. It doesn’t seem fair to count them, so: countries that have participated fewer than five times are excluded from the list. This means Morocco (10,5%) goes, having participated only once. Also the leader, Serbia and Montenegro (90,9%), vanishes from the chart. Following the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro took part as a combined state for two years. After that, each country entered their own participant.

N.B. 5: When two countries get the same average score, the country that particpated in the most editions goes on top.

This article was translated by Laura Watkinson.